Gallenger

In so far as I know you can only look at their souls - there'r still plenty of other people to talk to though :D.

It does - again - laziness lol. I went out up top for something, said "well maybe they'll recognize me without my robes" ... they didn't. Still have to be careful who you talk to even with the robes.

Funny thing is I'm *so* lazy, I decided not to equip the other 3 folks I had with me at the time to see what would happen - TURNS OUT - (I have the options off so maybe it was tied to my resolve or perception or something) - you can claim they're just mercs to guard you and nobody pays the fact that they don't have the proper gear on any mind! So you only have to change your set of clothes off and on! :D

This *feels* a lot more like PnP to me - because we always just hand-waived the fact that the party paid a small fee to have a team of mules + carts follow them around, and a few mercs to guard said wagons lol.

I'm likely guessing here - but maybe it will make our non-English speaking comrades feel better - early on in the game a lot of the characters don't speak proper English either - and perhaps attempts were made to carry this over into other languages. Or maybe it made the work of translation, within the spirit of the character itself, much more difficult.

I occasionally got crashes when area transitioning to and from interior/exterior map in Raedrics - however - the crashing upon reload was isolated (in my case) to the autosave that was made automatically - my previously made quick and manual saves were fine, and though the game would, on occasion, crash again at transition, it wouldn't do so immediately after reloading - however, it would always crash on transition if I loaded from the autosave. I've been really really anal about saving before area transitions because the original KOTOR had similar problems and I didn't have internet when I was a teenager, so I just had to deal with the unpatched constant area transition crashes lol.

weird mine are gone :/ Maybe it has to do with a particular dialogue choice or something once you wrap it up.

I honestly expected a animancer and an orlan rogue to be waiting on the road peddling me potions .

It's possible that the game launches without steam - I know lots of paradox games behave that way - if you're on a network you could try sharing it and booting without steam. Sadly steam must be open it appears.

I guess I have lucked out so far - happily playing on my 5 year old hardware without issue.

I haven't felt like this in so many years. It's like I'm a kid again waking up on christmas morning. Every time I think about this game, I just have flashbacks to little old teeny me playing through all the classic games for the very first time - and I have no doubt that you've recaptured some of that magic - with the team ya'll had there was no way you couldn't lol. Thank you Obsidian!

I wanted to go GoG because they're fun, and I have a ton of old RPGs on there, but I ultimately sided with steam for the updates, and the ease at which I'll be able to mod the game in the future - particularly if people get to making their own modules, that'll be super helpful.

You know it's funny, when the KS first announced I backed on the second day, but I felt a level of happiness and/or excitement akin to when a friend leaves a case of a beer at the house. Pleasant, but not super excited like a kid on christmas morning. But you know, today when I woke up, found that key... I'm legitamately excited lol - I haven't felt like this since I was watching NWN's tracking numbers come in. The ironic thing, is that that same day that NWN showed up on my front door step, a car crashed into the electricity pole right outside my house and I didn't have power for 24 hours. Hopefully no repeats this time!

I think Obsidian is hosting a release party in Cali being as I live very far away from there I haven't given it much thought lol.

The backers got the game and the content at a discount and had a small degree of input on the development... If you want to get review copies of the game - it's not like reviewing games is hard - get to it.

Very pleased - wonderful work and they're not even done yet? Color me excited - some more.

inXhile made the right choice. Their whole shtick is that combat will be fairly sparse in Tides. They can also integrate narrative elements more cleanly or stage fights out better with a turn based system. Since it's a story based character driven game, it was a good, logical choice. If combat was the deal breaker for you on that project you made a mistake funding it in the first place since there won't really be that much combat to be had. Let us also be honest and say that the combat in torment was also the worst part of that game in general - so saying the original was Rtwp, let's get some more rtwp, doesn't really excite me much. Having only a few epic battles with multiple text or cinematic interruptions, etc etc, that would be much more fitting. I imagine PE will be much closer to the non-Torment Black Isle titles and, as such, RTWP is the way to go, because the downside of TB combat only *really* presents itself when you have to use it a lot and encounter bunches of weak things to fight (I shudder at the thought of turn-based Nashkel mines).

Generally, I think the OP's annoyance is primarily found in newer games particularly of the MMO variety. That annoyance is something I share. I would contest however that in the games which PE is meant to harken back to, these sorts of quests were not present. In fact, early on in BG1, "fetch quests" are obviously all there is to do just about - and almost all of them do a few different things. 1. Mock the idea of fetch quests 2. Provide us with colorful journal entries and interactions with otherwise inconsequential NPCs (Dreppin's Cow, the lady that is super forgetful) that flesh out Candlekeep, the story arch, and the world of Faerun generally. These sorts of quests recur throughout the game, but they always somehow tie into the overall story arch, aren't readily available unless you do some exploring, or provide some color to the world. No rat butts to be found. Let's take ch. 2 Beregost fetch quests for example: 1. Lady in house, dead husband on road, return letter to her about dead husband, found by bumbling into people's houses. 2. Dispatch the mad priest deliver his holy symbol to temple, from town crier, teaches us about Zhentil keep, color text. 3. Find dwarfy-guys cloak, he accosts you in an inn, you can't even find his cloak until, generally, much much later in the game and may not even realize you've found it! 4. Beat up some half-ogres from wounded paladin, again just talking to random people - may find half orgres and not even realize it! 5. Get a book for Firebead Elvenhair, he's a guy you met in Candlekeep who knew you, provides you with a cool book in return, faux relationship + color text, flesh. 6. Find halfling's sword, go to place, return sword, mostly just for humorous exchange about halflings. There's probably 1-2 I'm missing but hey memories you know. I trust Obsidian to handle this well and not have us killing hordes of bears for their tongues, only to discover that not every bear has a tongue apparently, and then just getting xp and gold and sent on our way by some guy with an exclamation point on his head. You can easily make fetch quests engaging and fulfilling, beyond their xp/gp gains, which is a good thing, considering that, at early levels, fetch quests are a way of life in most RPGs. Some people will be lost on the story altogether, and will want their gp/xp and that's fine, for the rest of us there's plenty of angles for the devs to take without altering the gameplay. And yes, generally, in the real world, if you do something for somebody they recompense you in some way, be that gp or rare item provision, or telling their friends about how super cool you are. All have their place in an RPG.

In the old IE games, on the initial play through, you always generally had to use special use potions *during* fights, unless you were into just dying and save/loading (I'm far too impatient for that). Of course, on subsequent playthroughs you know when to use that potion of fire resistance, etc. I don't personally like the idea, it's neat, and to be honest, I'm one of those sickos that hopes there's a hardcore mode where you have to manage people's food and water intake, your weapons break constantly, and your merry band of adventurers are basically perpetually reduced to foraging about the woods for berries or a clean stream, only to be run off by a dire wolf. But ultimately it's nice to horde potions for just that perfect moment to give you that extra feeling of security, and especially with how *large* this game is supposed to be, some things could be pretty rough without special use items you have sitting in your inventory for ages, unless they just recycle multi-colored hobgoblins at us (I doubt they will do this).

I dunno... It seems to me like, if one of the analogue sticks took over the function of the mouse cursor... and the "a" button took over clicking, you could play BG fairly easy. Sure you wouldn't get hot keys, but at the bare basic level it would be playable - somebody already posted above a program that would allow you to fool a program into believing you were mouse and keyboarding it up - the only major issue would be binding keys to game pad buttons and the responsiveness of the analogue stick may be garbage. When in doubt, put your desktop in the kitchen and HOLD THE LINE. I had to do this for many years :D

I can attest that leather, if properly treated, is highly effective against heat. Having worked in a foundry, I would know - being as 90% of the gear we wore to protect ourselves from the heat of the cupola was made out of thick treated leather :D (the other 10% would be special insulative padding and the metal helmet of course lol). I also saw somebody get molten metal spilled on them, and yes, they were badly burned, but the leather held up surprisingly well. When we say "leather armor" you're typically talking about leather with some form of padding behind it, and has been processed to be quite hard. It's certainly better than wearing just your clothes - otherwise people would have worn just their clothes and it's shown basically without exception that people tried to provide themselves with some kind of armor - even if it was just padding - if they had that available to them. Leather armor was pretty popular in the Slavic nations - and was used a lot for training purposes especially - although the richest of fancy pants types would get themselves in metal armor of some kind, even if it was just leather with a metal plate stuck in it somewhere. The main issue, for history anyways, is that leather armor will decay much more rapidly so we don't really have too many functional examples of what leather armor would have looked like or been capable of. Futhermore, only the fanciest of fancy pants would have left wills and stories so we don't really have a great idea of what the lesser folks ran around in.

I think, as far as the cRPG's go, fallout 1-2 had rather good critical hit/miss results with some interesting dialogue added in. I'm personally not a huge fan of massive critical results and like for it to be normalized (much like in 3.5E D&D where you're locked into x2, x3, x4 damage etc). Mainly because the party will receive, in general, many more critical hits than they'll dish out - and if they have massive, and long reaching, in-game penalities, you're only truly hampering the players or robbing them of an interesting encounter because they got incredibly lucky (although a solid normal crit can do the same in some cases). I also enjoy the fallout critical failure results. Drop weapon, strike yourself, strike unintended target, cripple a limb, break the weapon, lose your ammo, lose AC points due to balance, etc. Because again, as far as the party goes it'll be fairly rare that they manage to roll a 1 at any point and it can add some hilarity and shake up encounters. Again though, only 1-2 of those have massive in-game penalities (broken weapon, crippled limb).

As far as villians go, say what you will about where the franchise has gone since in the case of Mass Effect, but I've always enjoyed villains like The Master and Saren. They are evil simply because they are utterly convinced of the correctness and necessity of their chosen path. When the player points out how misguided they've become... well there's an ending there that's unexpected lol. As the Master says "All that I have done in the name of good...." They *thought* they were doing the right thing and were willing to do anything to see it through. Human history is chalked full of such characters who often become villainized after their ends (or remain heros for their respective groups). While I still enjoy crazy/self motivated villains like Irenicus, Sarevok, Kreia, and Malak, they are, in my mind, easier to forget because they're purely self-motivated with some wacky plan that involves you somehow and require a lot more from writers to make them convincing and memorable. Somebody who believes they're going to help everybody in a big way, and is willing to do anything to accomplish that, and then ends up doing far more harm - that's a relatable story ezpz especially if it involves betrayal.

Tbh the idea that I won't be able to regain health easily terrifies me... In a good way.

The major issue would be the QA on this kinda thing. Who would look through all the entries and submissions and make sure they were what was wanted and or appropriate for the game. It may end up adding just as much work for the team overall. I'd be down for it though lol.